A rare complication of coronavirus appears to be painful and prolonged erections.
A new US victim of COVID-19 experienced priapism (a long-lasting erection) when, doctors believe, the disease caused blood to clot in the penis, according to a new complication study.
In August 2020, a 69-year-old obese man was hospitalized in Dayton, Ohio, in a hospital in Miami Valley, with a bad case of coronavirus.
The anonymous man, who eventually died from other complications of the virus, was suffering from severe breathing, inflammation and fluid in his lungs. The medical staff sedated him before putting him on a ventilator, but his condition continued to deteriorate.
After 10 days, his lungs began to sag, and the man was turned upside down – an emergency technique used to help the air move better throughout his body. After 12 hours, when the doctors turned him face up again, the nurses noticed that his shaft was erect.
After three hours, unable to remedy the situation with a packet of ice, doctors drained the man’s penis from the blood with a needle, successfully remedying the priapism attack. The man was unconscious throughout.
“Priapism has not reappeared,” wrote three doctors at the Miami Valley Hospital in a report on the patient in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. However, his lungs did not recover and the patient eventually died at the ICU.
Medical professionals say that the symptom is probably caused by an exaggerated immune reaction called a “cytokine storm” and makes sense as a side effect of COVID, which is known to cause blood clots. Non-affiliated doctors say that priapism is still an “interesting” manifestation of the disease.
“I have not seen such cases of COVID-related priapism like this and I have treated more patients with COVID than any other European hospital, as far as I know, so it is clearly a rare but explicable manifestation of COVID,” the doctor said. Consultant urologist surgeon Dr. Richard Viney of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham told the Daily Mail. “In this patient, he had a low-flow priapism that would certainly fit with microemboli (small clots that form in the smaller blood vessels) and this is one of the complications of COVID that we see in many other organ systems “.
In June, a separate study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine reported a similar situation: a 62-year-old man who contracted coronavirus experienced an erection resistant to the four-hour ice pack, which had to be drained with a needle. and is thought to have been caused by blood clots. Before contracting the new disease, the man had no history of blood clots.